Introduction

This project looks to compare school data between States on the West Coast. More specifically, the project aims to make conclusions on areas of improvement within Washington, Oregon, and California and display them in a meaningful way. This is important because well displayed data can be a strong tool to gain attention toward issues within the school systems. This data focuses on three different categories; enrolment, financials, and academic achievement. Enrollment is taken from the National Center for Education Statistics. Financials is taken from the United States Census Bureau’s annual survey of school system finances. Academic achievement comes from the Nations report card that provides national and state results in main school subjects.

Summary Information

When looking at these two data sets we were able to find a lot of interesting information regarding lower level education within our country and more specifically the West Coast. We found that the total number of students in the states of Washington, Oregon, and California is 7290644. Out of all of the schools in these three states we also found that the largest school has 5912 total students. These statistics give us a sense of the scale of the education system within the West Coast. Additionally, out of all of these schools we found that 10 percent of them are actually charter schools. One common concern regarding our country’s education system is lack of teachers compared to students in a school. We found that in the West Coast the average number of students to a teacher is 21. Finally, another key statistic we found was that, out of all students on the West Coast, 55 percent of them qualify for free or reduced lunch at their school.

Summary Table

Here is a Public Elementary-Secondary Education financial breakdown for the states of California, Oregon, and Washington (Selected years: 2002-2016). The data was grouped by State and summarize calculations were done by finding the mean of the expenditures/revnues for every three years. The purpose of this grouping is to showcase a time series of the cash flows of the educational system finances for the chosen states.

Year	State	Instruction EXP	Service EXP	Capital Layout EXP	Other EXP	Total Average Expenditure	Total Average Revenue	Outstanding Amount

2002-2004	CALIFORNIA	29259896	16645927	7860871	2975396	59620688	58235079	-1385609
2005-2007	CALIFORNIA	32714378	19260311	10109943	3286416	69381309	66997198	-2384111
2008-2010	CALIFORNIA	35605862	21569765	8473287	3669495	74204021	71980848	-2223173
2011-2013	CALIFORNIA	34211058	20418439	6473495	3478754	69922234	69612746	-309488
2014-2016	CALIFORNIA	39026215	23718147	6428046	3777352	78730967	79951477	1220510

2002-2004	OREGON	2477559	1567558	549945	171959	5117700	4816902	-300798
2005-2007	OREGON	2834917	1797414	325893	189990	5539554	5366594	-172960
2008-2010	OREGON	3251619	2079101	666151	215476	6506863	6162073	-344790
2011-2013	OREGON	3257766	2065602	417965	227292	6286641	6104951	-181690
2014-2016	OREGON	3641021	2263649	491566	249502	6989066	7050376	61310

2002-2004	WASHINGTON	4320537	2507991	1148128	395506	8725008	8535587	-189421
2005-2007	WASHINGTON	4868311	2857718	1446491	444306	9999206	9723938	-275268
2008-2010	WASHINGTON	5826829	3412317	1710898	504833	11913037	11713109	-199928
2011-2013	WASHINGTON	5928417	3646851	1487470	525435	12071282	12034585	-36697
2014-2016	WASHINGTON	6621382	4483732	1776981	558040	13896578	13904668	8090

Take-Aways: When comparing all three states, we can see that California’s educational finances accumulated, on average, the largest total expenditures. We can also see that for awhile they’ve face a lot of outstanding debt. This could be interpreted as a funding flaw California faces within their educational system.

Though its also important to note that, California wasn’t the only state that dealt with outstanding finacial debts. Oregon and Washington also faced some financials issues throughout 2002 to 2013. It wasn’t until recently, around 2014-2016, that these states started to end their year debt free.

Chart 1

The purpose of this chart is to compare the average teacher to student ratio between the three West Coast States.

Some interesting observations:

California’s average teachers per school is 26.8 and Washington’s is 26.4, yet California has an average of over 100 more students per school than Washington.
Oregon and Washington also have similar averages of students yet Oregon has three less teachers per school than Washington.

Chart 2

The purpose of this chart is to identify any trends between the average student/teacher ratio and the average number of students, sorted by the type of locale(area). This chart can give us insight into what types of areas typically have high student/teacher ratios and a high number of students. These two continuous variables should move together as we look at more densely populated areas; this chart useful in comparing two continuous variables grouped by a categorical variable.

A couple observations can be made from this chart.

Out of all of the data points, the areas with the highest average student/teacher ratios and the highest average number of students are mostly cities and suburbs of varying sizes.
Even though cities are more densely populated than suburban areas, the data point for “Suburban: Large” had a higher average student/teacher ratio and a higher average number of students than “City: Large”.
Schools in rural areas in remote locations have an average student/teacher ratio of 14. They also average 108 students per school.

Chart 3

This chart is useful in analyzing continuous variables over time. The purpose of this chart is to identify any trends over time between 1993 and 2016 with the student enrollment of west coast states, Washington, Oregon, and California. This chart is not only useful in showing any changes in enrollment over time, but it allows us to see the differences between states.